Branding is an essential aspect of your marketing strategy. If you develop an awesome branding strategy, people will get to know your brand, your company, and your website. In this post, I will first explain what branding is and why it can help you with your SEO. After that, I’ll give 5 practical tips you can use to improve your own branding strategy.
What is branding?
Branding is the process of creating a clear, unique image of your product or your company. Your audience should be able to recognize your brand. Whether it is a post on Facebook, your newsletter or the product section on your website, the image of your brand should be similar.
Branding is hard. In order to set up a successful branding strategy, you should first have a clear vision in mind what your brand is about: What is your mission? What values are important? Which style fits your brand (formal/informal)? What does your preferred audience look like?
Why is branding important for SEO?
If you are able to set up a high quality branding strategy, optimizing your site for the search engines will become much easier. Chances rise that your preferred audience will get to know your brand name. Your brand name could then become an incentive to click on your link in the search results (even if you’re not in the top three!). And, if you do your branding really well, people will start searching for your brand as well. It’ll be far less hard to rank for your brand, than for a lot of other search terms.
In order to help you to set up a successful branding strategy yourself, I will share 5 practical tips:
Tip 1: Stay consistent
The most important thing in branding is to stay consistent. Develop a certain style and stick with it! Design a logo, and stick with it! Phrase your mission and stick with it! If you are consistent in the way you present your brand to your audience, people will eventually start to remember and to recognize your brand.
Want to make sure your audience will grow and will keep on growing? In our Blog SEO eBook will give you lots of practical marketing tips! »
Tip 2: Phrase a tagline and make it visible
Your tagline phrases the most important message about your brand or your product in a single sentence. Make sure it stands out on your website. You can for instance place a tagline below your brand name. The tagline of Yoast is: the art & science of website optimization.
If possible, try to write your taglines in an action-oriented way. You can do this by using verbs and sentences that imply an action for the visitor. For instance, we could have a tagline saying: ‘Keep your site optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin!’. This shows people one of the core values of the plugin, and making it active will motivate a lot more people to actually try it.
Tip 3: Use images
Images are a very important aspect of your branding strategy. You can use pictures and illustrations on your website, in your newsletter, on Facebook or in (printed) advertisements. Of course, you should make sure your images fit your brand. If you sell ballet shoes, you should probably not use pictures of wild animals in the jungle. You would want to use pictures that express elegance and grace.
If you consistently pick illustrations and photos that fit your brand, your audience will eventually recognize and remember your brand from simply looking at your pictures. At Yoast, we work with two illustrators in order to make unique illustrations that will give the Yoast feeling to our audience.
If you use your own photos, you could try to develop some sort of consistent style. You can for instance make sure all your pictures have the same dimensions, use a similar way of editing or use similar pictures. On Facebook, we always put a text bar on our images. We include the title of our post and the Yoast logo in that text bar. That text bar ensures consistency within all of our Facebook posts.
Tip 4: Use your brand name
Make sure your brand name will become familiar to your audience. That means you should use that brand name! Perhaps you can use your brand name in one of your products like we do in Yoast SEO. Make sure to use your brand name in your newsletter and in your (Facebook) posts. People should hear and read your brand name regularly!
Tip 5: Use your logo
Your logo is of great importance to your branding strategy. Branding is more than designing an awesome logo though (that’s why this is the final tip and not the first one I share). Ideally, your logo should stand out, it should be something people recognize without any context. Designing a logo doesn’t have to be too expensive. Go check out 99designs for instance!
The colors you choose for your logo are of great importance as well. Make sure to use these colors elsewhere: in your newsletter, on your website, in images. If you use the same colors everywhere, these colors will become part of your brand. People will recognize your brand only by looking at the colors in your newsletter or in your Facebook post.
Once you have a kickass logo, make sure to use it! Present it to your audience: on your website, in your newsletter, on Facebook: everywhere!
Conclusion
If you develop a successful branding strategy, people will remember and recognize your brand. In the long run, your logo or brand name will be something that immediately evokes emotions. As people get more familiar with your brand, your SEO will get easier as well. Therefore, combining your SEO strategy with an awesome branding strategy is the way to go!
: ‘Positioning your shop in the online market’ »
Source:: SEO
